ActivePerl 1205 -- Release Notes
    Welcome, and thank you for downloading ActivePerl. This release
    corresponds to Perl version 5.12.4.

    The following platforms are supported by this release:

    *  AIX 5.3 or later (rs6000)

    *  HP-UX: 11.00 or later (PA-RISC)

    *  Linux: glibc 2.3 or later (x86 and x64)

    *  Mac OS X 10.4 or later (x86 and powerpc)

    *  Solaris 2.8 or later (sparc, 32 and 64 bit)

    *  Solaris 10 or later (x86)

    *  Windows XP (x86)

    *  Windows Server 2003, Vista, Server 2008, 7 (x86 and x64)

For a chronological list of changes included in this and past releases,
see the ActivePerl 5.12 Change Log.
ActivePerl Community Edition Support Policy
    The two most recent stable releases are available for free download.
    This corresponds to the Perl community's own version support policy.

    Whenever the underlying Perl version becomes "unsupported" by the Perl
    community itself, support for the corresponding ActivePerl versions
    will be limited to Business Edition and Enterprise Edition customers.

    You can continue to use older ActivePerl releases indefinitely under
    the terms of the Community Edition license, but won't be able to
    download the installers from ActiveState.

    The PPM repositories for unsupported ActivePerl releases will remain
    freely accessible for at least 6 months after support ends, but will
    no longer be updated with new builds from CPAN.

Incompatibilities
    Perl 5.12 is not binary compatible with Perl 5.10 or 5.8. In
    particular, do not attempt to use extensions or PPM packages built for
    ActivePerl 800 and 1000 series builds with ActivePerl 1200 series
    builds and vice versa. Please check "Incompatible Changes" in
    perl5120delta for known source level incompatibilities between the
    Perl 5.12 releases and the earlier release series.

Known Issues
  PPM
    There are some known outstanding issues with the PPM 4 client:

    *  The PPM state database (containing configuration information for
       repositories, view options in the GUI, and repository state) is not
       imported from previous installations.

       If you have added custom PPM 4 repositories in previous ActivePerl
       releases then you should reconfigure them manually with "ppm repo
       add ..." or in the GUI. The repository state will be automatically
       re-synchronized when PPM is run.

    *  Post install scripts for packages installed from the GUI will not
       be able to receive non-default answers for any prompts it might
       produce. Packages that need non-default answers must be installed
       with the command line version of ppm.

    *  List icons will sometimes not repaint properly after scrolling
       under X11. This does not affect the Windows and Mac OS X builds.

    *  Running "sudo ppm ..." the first time "ppm" is invoked from a
       regular user account on Unix will create a *root* owned state
       database. This effectively makes the database read-only when
       running "ppm" without "sudo", and might manifest itself as
       Application Error dialogs when running the GUI. Workaround is to
       run "sudo chown -R $USER ~/.ActivePerl" once to fix up ownership of
       the state database.

  AIX
    *  GNU tar is required to extract the ActivePerl tarball into the
       filesystem. A precompiled version of GNU tar for AIX 5L can be
       found here:

           http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/os/aix/linux/toolbox/download.html

       You can also get the source package for GNU tar from:

           http://www.gnu.org/

    *  The reloc_perl script does not correctly update the perl-dynamic
       executable. The workaround is to install directly from the tarball
       into the new location.

  Solaris
    *  GNU tar is required to extract the ActivePerl tarball into the
       filesystem. A precompiled version of GNU tar for Solaris is
       available from:

           http://www.sunfreeware.com/

       You can also get the source package for GNU tar from:

           http://www.gnu.org/

  Mac OS X
    *  Perl library paths, and thus PPM Areas, defined in the shell by the
       PERL5LIB environment variable are not available to PPM when it is
       launched by clicking the PPM icon in OS X. To to make this variable
       available in the OS X GUI, add an entry similar to the following to
       ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist:

        <key>PERL5LIB</key>
        <string>/path/to/perl/lib</string>

    *  Running "sudo ppm" or "sudo ppm gui" does not start up the GUI with
       *root* privileges. Use "ppm" as a command line tool with "sudo".

  Windows
    *  The fork() emulation has known limitations. See perlfork for a
       detailed summary. In particular, fork() emulation will not work
       correctly with extensions that are either not thread-safe, or
       maintain internal state that cannot be cloned in the pseudo-child
       process. This caveat currently applies to extensions such as Tk and
       Storable.

    *  It seems that some people are having problems with the ActivePerl
       MSI installer. The first thing to note is that you CANNOT install
       ActivePerl 5.12 over an older version of ActivePerl based on 5.10,
       5.8, 5.6 or 5.005, such as build 1007 or any other 1000, 800, 600
       or 500 series build. We have determined that some of these problems
       are due to other installations of Perl that may be pointed at by
       something in the environment.

       The sure-fire solution is to make absolutely certain that no other
       installations of Perl are on the target machine. Realizing that
       this is not always possible, you can follow these steps to ensure
       the other installations will not interfere.

       1   Stop the "Windows Installer" service. This can be accomplished
           from the command prompt using the following command:

               c:\> net stop "Windows Installer"

       2   Temporarily remove or rename PERLLIB and PERL5LIB environment
           variables in the system environment.

       3   Temporarily remove or rename the following registry values:

               [\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Perl] lib = <directory> (REG_SV)
               [\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Perl] sitelib = <directory> (REG_SV)
               [\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Perl] lib-<PerlVersion> = <directory> (REG_SV)
               [\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Perl] sitelib-<PerlVersion> = <directory>(REG_SV)

       4   Proceed with the installation.

       Once the installation has completed successfully, the above actions
       may be undone although restoring the environment variables or the
       registry values may interfere with the proper operation of your new
       ActivePerl installation. In order to perform all of the above
       steps, you will need to have Administrative privileges on the
       target machine. If you do not have the required privileges you
       should contact you Administrator.

  Further Information
    The Perl distribution comes with extensive documentation. On Unix
    platforms, all the standard documentation is installed as man pages
    under the Perl install location. The location of the man pages may
    need to be added to the MANPATH environment variable in order to
    access them. For example, in the C shell:

        % setenv MANPATH /opt/ActivePerl-5.12/man:$MANPATH

    The documentation is installed in HTML format on all platforms. If
    ActivePerl was installed in /opt/ActivePerl-5.12 then the HTML
    documentation would be located in /opt/ActivePerl-5.12/html.

    On Windows, the standard documentation along with Windows-specific
    Perl documentation is installed in HTML format, and is accessible from
    the "Start" menu.

    Updated versions of the HTML documentation will always be available at
    the ActiveState website:

        http://www.activestate.com/ActivePerl

Reporting Problems
    Please report any bugs you encounter with this release in the
    ActiveState bug database:

        http://bugs.activestate.com

    If you do not have web access, reports can be also sent via email to
    ActivePerl-Bugs@ActiveState.com. Please be sure to include detailed
    information about the platform in your message.

    As far as possible, please ensure that there is enough information in
    the report to reproduce the bug elsewhere. It also helps to submit a
    minimal test case that exhibits the bug.

ActivePerl Community Edition Support Policy
    The two most recent stable releases are available for free download.
    This corresponds to the Perl community's own version support policy.

    Whenever the underlying Perl version becomes "unsupported" by the Perl
    community itself, support for the corresponding ActivePerl versions
    will be limited to Business Edition and Enterprise Edition customers.

    You can continue to use older ActivePerl releases indefinitely under
    the terms of the Community Edition license, but won't be able to
    download the installers from ActiveState.

    The PPM repositories for unsupported ActivePerl releases will remain
    freely accessible for at least 6 months after support ends, but will
    no longer be updated with new builds from CPAN.

